Via Lydia Pintscher, I found Sita Sings the Blues, a delightful CC-licensed movie. It’s basically a “musical, animated personal interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana.”
One neat thing it does is frequently switch between different narrative and visual styles. It’s a bit slow at times, but I like it.
Here’s a typical clip. Visit the site for the full thing.
Here’s a neat video I found via Google Alerts:
From Life of Pi:
I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!”–and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.
Guh, this ad creeps me out. I don’t like the interesting, unique, and personal brides being processed into fembots.
This one’s gross. From Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon:
The room contained a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.
Elaine and I just got back from a week-long California vacation (mostly in San Diego). I believe pictures will appear on her flickr or facebook feed.
First, you didn’t feel as shitty for exploiting animals in their sad little exhibits. These enclosures were massive — the African herbivores got 213 acres.
Second, the animals seemed much more active and interesting. Rather than peering into an exhibit to see a leg of a sleeping antelope, you got to see a whole herd making their way to the water hole. The roaming space and presence of other animals seemed to make them more active.
The carnivores got less space since they were each in their own enclosure, and were subsequently less active it seemed. But we caught a feeding, so we saw the cheetahs walking around at least.
Apparently their breeding program is very successful (averages a birth a day). They were working on bringing a rhino population back to decent numbers, and they were one of the few zoos that has had success breeding them.
I think/hope this is the future of zoos. It seemed better for visitors and animals. I assume the primary disadvantage is the space (and maybe cost — not sure if it’s cheaper or more expensive to house multiple animals in a field). The San Diego Zoo proper just added a giant new elephant exhibit that looked very similar to the Park’s elephant exhibit in terms of space. So maybe they’re gradually going in that direction.
Two quick recommendations today!
One is Battlestar Galactica the board game. It’s very good; basically Mafia the board game.
The players (all characters from the show) are each given secret cards that say whether they’re human or cylon. Halfway through the game they’re each given another one (a ’sleeper cylon’ flavor).
The humans’ goal is to survive (not run out of food, fuel, people, or morale) until the fleet reaches their destination. The cylons’ goal is to sap those resources and slow the fleet down.
Often the secret cylons sabotage while amongst the humans. So it makes for lots of interesting accusations and all that jazz.
The other recommendation is the book Accelerando by Charles Stross. I read it back when it was up for the Hugo in 2006, but I had forgotten the name until recently.
It’s about humanity reaching a singularity and is full of interesting ideas and technologies. Worth a read if like science fiction. It’s even available as a CC-licensed download, so no reason not to read it!
So I finally got around to watching Watchmen. I’ve read and appreciated the graphic novel.
Like many other book/movie adaptations, I feel that the attempt to stay rigidly true to the source material hurt the movie. When I read the book, I was into the character development, background, and side stories. But when I watched the movie, a lot of it felt plodding.
Watchmen (either version) is basically a three-page big reveal writ long. I felt the movie could have cut more.
The movie was very graphic, wasn’t afraid to be bloody or brutal. It worked well.
I felt the film’s Rorschach was more tangible and interesting than I remember the book’s being.
I also especially liked the opening credit sequence. It’s artistic style and method of conveying the alternate Earth’s important events in short scenes were very well done.
Good soundtrack.
A couple years ago, I remember reading about a script that would scan a source tree and tell you the minimum required version of GTK+ based on the symbols used. I can’t find it anymore. Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
I assume it could be rewritten these days using sexy gobject introspection and thus apply to more than just GTK+. But I’d be happy with the older, basic script.
In exchange for clues about the script, here’s a neat bash tip: I discovered that if you put a space before a command you type on the console, it doesn’t show up in the bash history. It’s not in the output of history and doesn’t show up when you scroll up through your commands with the up arrow.
I’m not sure what the non-malicious uses of that trick are, but there you go.
I love the UCA (Unicode Collation Algorithm). It’s all about how to sort words in any given language. Some languages have intriguingly different rules (most of that page is pretty dry, but it does have interesting tidbits like: German dictionaries and German telephone directories have different sort orders).